Cougar Point has ruined Intel's Sandy Bridge party. A flaw in the chips SATA handling has caused Dell, HP, and others to pull Sandy Bridge computers off the market. MSI and Gigabyte have also pulled their Sandy Bridge motherboards. Intel is expected to lose at least $1B USD from the mistake. (Source: VR-Zone)

The Alienware M17x R3 from Dell is among the models pulled. (Source: Hardware Heaven)

Quad-core second gen i-Series boards get the boot, due to chipset flaw

Intel seemed to be swinging for the fences with the release of Sandy Bridge. It delivered a healthy supply of its next generation i-Series quad-core processors to market. Packing awesome performance and greater power efficiency, these chips looked ready to help Intel further the gap between it and distant second-place CPU maker AMD. Now a costly flaw in the Cougar Point chipset has sent Intel -- and its OEM partners -- into panic mode.

Now the first wave of OEM cancellations has begun. HP and NEC both announced that they would be pushing back [report] the launch of new Sandy Bridge models. And Gigabyte and MSI, two of the desktop computing industry's top motherboard makers, announced [report] that they were terminating sales of Sandy Bridge boards until Intel delivers sufficient quantities of untainted stock.

Dell and HP are also halting online sales of existing Sandy Bridge laptops. Dell writes, "This affects four currently-available Dell products, the XPS 8300, the Vostro 460, the Alienware M17x R.3 and the Alienware Aurora R.3, as well as several other planned products including XPS 17 with 3D. We're committed to addressing this with customers who have already purchased one of the four products and will provide further details on this as it becomes available."

Most companies are moving to try to work with customers who have bought the hot new laptop-turned-lemon.

Intel initially estimated the damages from the flaw to be around $300M USD, then it upped it to $700M USD, and its latest estimate says it may lose as much as $1B USD from warranty fulfillment and lost sales. It would be unsurprising, given the inflating nature of the figure, to see the true losses rise even higher.

Meanwhile, AMD is waiting in the shadows, with Bulldozer, its next-generation high-performance desktop architecture that's supposed to drop sometime around April. And AMD's battery-friendly Fusion processors may manage to steal a bit of business away from non-gamer laptop buyers, as well, particularly from customers who are disenchanted with Intel.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer